Oktoberfest was great fun this year!
After a very full day of sorting through boxes we never unpacked when we moved here 4 years ago, we partied big time with friends at the KC Hall.
Who'da thunk I would ever be able to do both in one day? Yay, us!
While sorting papers into "keepers" and "burn, baby, burn" boxes, I found my transcripts from high school.
I had no idea, until yesterday, that I have been engaging in my own revisionist history.
I asked my Mom, "why have you let me think I was such an awesome student all these years?!"
"Well," said my very sage Mother, "You excelled where you wanted to, and I guess the rest just didn't matter. Forget about it! That was almost 20 years ago!"
20 years ago...the only thing this realization proves is... I have a weird capacity to remember the good, and completely forget the bad, unless the bad was too horrendous to forget. Those things which terrorized my spirit have been pushed to the corners of my consciousness. The good, however, shone forth as a beacon, preserving me from despair in innumerable instances.
These handicaps (or, perhaps, blessings) have served me well on my journey thus far.
I have been afforded, and accepted, opportunities to do everything I had hoped to, in spite of my mediocrity and failings.
Perhaps this is why Karol Wojtyla's assertion resonates profoundly within me,
"The evil of our times consists in the degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person." (1968)
For, in retrospect, the things I cherish are those which make me who I am.
Not extraordinary, phenomenal, or even particularly brilliant, just an einzigartig unvergleichlicher Mensch.
I can only look up and say, "Thank God!"
Cue Marley, one more time...
1 comment:
sounds like me as well...interested=A or B, not interested = do the minimum to get by. Italian class was the exception that proved the rule...I tried my butt off in that class, and only passed via a gift from il proffesore! (to boot, I probably just butchered this phrase!)
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